Nicola Lacey and David Soskice
Crime, punishment and segregation in the United States: the paradox of local democracy Article (Accepted version) (Refereed)
Original citation: Lacey, Nicola and Soskice, David (2015) Crime, punishment and segregation in the United States: the paradox of local democracy. Punishment and Society, 17 (4). pp. 454-481. ISSN 1462-4745 DOI: 10.1177/1462474515604042 © 2015 The Authors This version available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/61694/ Available in LSE Research Online: October 2015 LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in LSE Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute the URL (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the LSE Research Online website. This document is the author’s final accepted version of the journal article. There may be differences between this version and the published version. You are advised to consult the publisher’s version if you wish to cite from it.
1
Forthcoming in Punishment and Society
Crime, Punishment and Segregation in the United States: The Paradox of Local Democracy
Nicola Lacey and David Soskice
Introduction
A copious literature has analysed the increase in levels of both crime and punishment in developed
countries over the last 40 years. A comparative strand in this literature has thrown light on the
differences between countries both in patterns of offending and, particularly, in patterns of
punishment relative to trends in crime, and has ventured some explanations. Drawing on the
analysis of Varieties of Capitalism (Hall and Soskice 2001), it has been suggested that the
institutional capacity both to temper crime and to retain stable penal policy and moderation in
punishment is greater in the co-ordinated political economies of northern Europe and the Nordic
region, while the costs of exclusionary punishments are, at least for insiders, greater in these
economies (Lacey 2008). Conversely, the more flexible, and significantly more unequal liberal
market economies, lack the institutional mechanisms of coordination which foster capacity to
broker cross-institutional agreements to stabilise penal policy in coordinated market economies.
Moreover the lower investment made by liberal market economies in education and training implies
that the cost of exclusionary and stigmatising punishment of those surplus to labour market
requirements is lower than in coordinated market economies.
Among the higher-crime, more punitive liberal market economies which share similar economic and
welfare state structures (Esping-Andersen 1990), however, the United States stands out in terms of
both levels of serious violent crime, as measured by homicide rates or aggravated assaults (Gallo et
al 2014), and punitiveness, as measured by imprisonment rates (Lacey and Soskice forthcoming). For
2
example, in the 1950s, the imprisonment rate in the US was double that in England and Wales;
today, despite the fact that the English/Welsh rate has itself doubled in the intervening decades, the
US rate is five times higher, with American prison rates at levels unprecedented among developed
countries (Figure 1). The homicide rate stands at between 4 and 5 times that of England and Wales –
not entirely out of line with its ratio in 1950 (6:1), but much lower than when homicide rates
reached their peak in the 1970s, when the US rate reached ten times that of England and Wales
(UNODC 2012).
There is a substantial literature which ponders the striking history of criminal justice in America
during this period (Garland 2001; Lynch 2010; Pfaff 2012; Simon 2007; Tonry 2004; Wacquant 2009;
Western 2006; Whitman 2003; Zimring, Hawkins and Kamin 2001; Zimring 2007, 2012). Three things
about this literature are worthy of comment. First, the literature which is concerned with patterns of
punishment –particularly with the growth of mass imprisonment – is relatively separate from the
literature on patterns of crime, with the maintenance of high imprisonment rates notwithstanding
steadily falling crime since the early 1990s encouraging the view that the two phenomena run on
different tracks. Moreover much of the literature on crime is reluctant to venture general
hypotheses, concentrating rather on using data to undermine mono-causal explanations (notably
the impact of policing, imprisonment or unemployment). Secondly – and with one partial but
important exception, that of race, - to the extent that these literatures speak to one another, they
do so primarily in terms of an investigation of how criminal justice variables such as the ‘War on
Drugs’, sentencing frameworks, levels of imprisonment or policing affect crime rates and vice versa,
rather than in terms of how broader economic, social or political dynamics shape each of these
areas. Thirdly, although much of this literature is ostensibly concerned with politics, and goes
forward in terms of discussions of ‘the politics of race and crime’, ‘the politics of law and order’
or‘punishment and democracy’, these references to politics in the criminological and sociological
3
literature mainly emphasise the salience of crime and punishment as political issues. They rarely
scrutinise the relevant preferences and interests, and the political institutions through which
criminal justice preferences and policies are constructed and filtered over time. Unfortunately, with
a few honourable exceptions, political scientists have returned the compliment by ignoring crime,
punishment and criminal justice institutions as genuinely political phenomena worthy of systematic
analysis.i
In this paper, we seek to explain why both crime and punishment rose so sharply in the USA in the
1970s and 1980s, and why crime and the rate of change of punishment fell from the early 1990s
onwards. These patterns of crime and punishment in the USA greatly magnify corresponding
developments in other Liberal Market Economies - Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK -
faced with similar broad macro-technological transformations, namely the collapse of Fordism in the
1970s and 1980s and the development of knowledge economies in the 1990s and 2000s. We set out
the case for seeing these differences as largely the product of dynamics shaped by the institutional
structure of the American political system. On the face of it, this may seem a surprising claim, given
that all these countries are competitive political systems in Lijphart’s sense (Lijphart 1984, 1999), by
contrast to the negotiated political systems of Northern Europe. Nor – in comparing the American
political system with these others – do we suggest that it is the Presidency or the operation of
Congress which is the relevant factor. We will argue, rather, that the distinctive American trajectory
is shaped directly and indirectly by local democracy in the USA in the key policy areas of residential
zoning, public education, and criminal justice (embracing policing, prosecution and sentencing). The
American level of local autonomy has no parallel in the other Anglo-Saxon polities, where regulatory
frameworks as well as senior appointments of officials are made at national or provincial level. Local
democracy, especially in the large Northern and Mid-Western cities, we hypothesise, may help to
4
explain America’s distinctive patterns of crime and punishment in the late 20th Century, because it
magnified through residential and educational segregation and concentrated poverty the social
problems caused by deindustrialisation and the collapse of Fordism (Peach 1996; Johnston et al
2007; Peterson and Krivo 2010). Why then did violent crime drop and the rate of change of
imprisonment fall from the early to mid 1990s on? We hypothesise and present evidence that the
move back into city centres of young professionals associated with the ‘knowledge economy’ both
dramatically improved local labor markets for low skilled males and operated via local democracy to
change policing tactics in some inner city areas. This thesis is backed up by the evidence that city
populations continued falling in large cities in which crime continued rising (notably Detroit,
Philadephia, Milwaukee and for a time Baltimore: see Figure 6). More generally, we argue that the
debate about the relationship between crime and punishment has been distorted by its focus on
imprisonment rates: while imprisonment rates do not track crime, rates of change in imprisonment
track violent crime, in a lagged way, remarkably closely (see Figure 4).
How can local democracy generate such outcomes? The hypothesis which we put forward in this
paper is that decisive voters in generally low turnout local elections (municipalities, counties, school
boards, district attorneys and judges) are home-owners for whom a main concern is the value of
their primary assets: their homes; and residential and implicit educational segregation, as well as
tough policing, prosecution and incarceration, all played a part in the distancing of their homes from
poverty and disorder during the 1970s and 1980s. While decisive voters remain home owners, we
discuss the (limited but important) extent to which some of these policies – notably on policing –
changed when inner city populations grew again from the early 1990s.
5
In direct opposition to the view that the cause of the ills of American criminal justice in the late
twentieth century derives from an excess of ‘federalisation’ (Stuntz 2011, Scheingold 2010), we
suggest that the radically decentralised character of American democracy may have been a key, if
indirect, cause of both relatively high rates of crime (particularly serious violent crime: Miller,
forthcoming) and punitiveness under the economic and social conditions prevailing from the 1970s
until the 1990s following the collapse of Fordism. We further suggest that the crime decline and the
gradual stabilisation of imprisonment rates since the 1990s has been shaped by local political
dynamics, particularly in large cities, attendant on the emergence of a knowledge economy.
While both decentralisation and the impact of political institutions at the local level have begun to
feature in a small literature on various aspects of criminal justice (Barker 2009; Garland 2010, 2013;
Campbell 2012), there has as yet been no attempt to provide an integrated analysis of just how
those institutions affect the interests and motivations of relevant groups of actors such as voters,
criminal justice officials and political elites across a range of interlinked policy areas. The ambition of
our paper is to set out a clear hypothesis about the role of the decentralised American political
system in driving both punishment and, more controversially, crime from the 1970s to the 1990; to
show how that thesis is consistent with the crime decline and deceleration of punishment over the
last 20 years; to review the evidence which gives credence to our thesis, and supports the view that
crime levels have been a more important determinant of incarceration rates than has been generally
supposed; and to make the case for a research agenda exploring what has been a largely neglected
area in the study of American criminal justice.
6
The politics of crime and punishment in America
Democracy In America: non-partisan electoral competition in multiple arenas
Voter affiliations – and hence the strategies which candidates use in seeking election – are defined in
the USA in terms of the policies and even personalities of current office-seekers or office-holders to
a much greater extent than the more disciplined political systems of the other Anglo-Saxon
countries: in the American system, characterized by weak party discipline, it pays leaders, as
individual candidates for office, to appeal directly to voters. In this context, policies likely to secure
independent votes by appealing to median voter interests have become a key preoccupation for
political leaders. To the extent that criminal justice is identified by politicians as just such an issue
(here crime and the fear of crime potentially enter the political picture, Enns 2014), this sets up,
loosely speaking, a ‘prisoners’ dilemma’ (Lacey 2008) in which candidates become locked into a
strategy which they dare not abandon because of the electoral advantage, particularly vis-à-vis
‘floating voters’, which they fear would accrue to the other side. Key examples at the national level
would be Richard Nixon’s War on Drugs (later amplified by Ronald Reagan) and Bill Clinton’s
enthusiastic support for the death penalty. The key impact of the electoral ‘prisoners’ dilemma’
dynamic in the US seems likely, however, to be at the state and local levels.
The impact of political institutions on criminal justice varies significantly as between different levels
of electoral competition (Miller 2008). But these levels are much more numerous and differentiated
in the US than in almost any other advanced democracy (Soskice 2009). The radically extensive and
extraordinarily decentralized quality of American democracy sets up, we suggest, two dynamics
which, particularly in a world of relatively widespread anxiety about crime, strongly shape the
formation of crime policy. First, it implies that the ‘prisoners’ dilemma’ is reproduced through very
frequent elections at state, county and municipal levels, significantly increasing its impact. Second, it
7
implies an accountability gap: individuals seeking election at local level have an interest in
advocating popular policies the costs of which do not necessarily fall on the electoral constituency
(Soskice 2009; Boggess and Bound 1993; Stuntz 2001; Campbell 2012:306; Zimring 2012 Appendix
B). Increased resort to imprisonment, where the political benefit accrues largely to local politicians
while the costs fall on the state, would be a key example. This accountability gap is a common
consequence of the negative externalities of local decision-making, another example being
expenditure on the education of those who subsequently move elsewhere.
In relation to the key policy areas relevant to poverty, segregation and crime and punishment, it
would be hard to exaggerate the distinctiveness of the American tendency to organize governmental
and executive power through electoral mechanisms at the local level (see Figure 3). Though state
politics and the varying institutional structure of states are undoubtedly of great importance in
understanding crime policy (Barker 2009), there is strong reason to think that the local level of the
county or city, where in any case many state policies have to be implemented and interpreted – a
level which is more laborious to research, and hence less fully understood - has been of equal or
even greater significance. And if weak party discipline and personal platform- domination has largely
characterized national and state level politics, this is yet more true of local politics. Here actors with
key roles in the criminal process - mayors, judges, district attorneys, sheriffs, to name only the most
obvious – are, in stark contrast to other liberal market economies, often elected, and hence subject
to direct electoral discipline; and their electoral campaigns depend on an extensive practice of radio
and television advertising focused on individual record or policy commitments rather than on party
platforms. Beyond this, the American practice of electing officials – County Commissioners, School
Boards, Treasurers and so on - reaches deep into institutions at one or more remove from the
criminal justice system, in which a median voter orientation will be likely, under certain conditions,
to bring concerns about crime and punishment into play. These locally elected officials in turn
8
appoint police chiefs and zoning boards. The resulting electoral cycle effects on policy areas such as
police hiring, rates of prosecution, rates of dropping charges and conviction rates (particularly in
property and drug cases: Dyke 2007) and even judicial decision-making on sentencing and case
disposal are amply attested in a developing political science literature (Brooks and Raphael 2002;
Gordon and Huber 2004; Berdejó and Yuchtman 2013; Levitt 1997; Shepherd 2009)ii as well as in
ethnographic research (Bogira 2005: 311-36).
The collapse of Fordism and the rise in violent crime and punishment from the late 1960s to early
1990s: the polarizing and reinforcing dynamics of local electoral democracy in education, zoning
and crime policy
In this section, we develop a testable thesis about how the dynamics of decentralized politics
reacted to the social and economic upheavals of the collapse of Fordism and led to two decades of
sharply rising violent crime and incarceration.
The ultimate locus of most democratic decision-making in residential zoning, public schools and law
and order (policing, public prosecution and non-appellate state justice) in the US is the city or
county; this entails that local autonomy has tremendous power, and that decisions reflect the
interests and preferences of median voters. The decisive voter in local elections is likely to be a
home owner with strong concerns (Fischel 2001, 2004) to segregate the poor residentially – in the
suburbs to keep the poor out , and in the cities to push the poor into their own enclaves (Beckett
and Herbert 2009); to keep property taxes low if public schools are bad (de facto segregated) or high
if they are good, in order to maintain property values; and in any case to promote de facto
educational segregation. The exclusionary implications of homeowners’ concern with property
9
values is amply attested in the minutes of homeowner and neighbourhood associations in relation to
zoning boards. These local political dynamics in zoning and public education explain the background
conditions of densely segregated housing and de facto segregated and less resourced education for
poor ethnic groups; as employment fell for less-skilled male workers in Fordist plants, so
unemployment and poverty grew in these neighbourhoods – reinforcing the local politics of
residential and educational segregation.
Another ‘local’ policy area is policing, with cities having independent police forces and in
consequence senior appointments and decisions about police practices being made at local level.
Refracted through mayoral and council elections broad police practices are responsive to local
democracy. To take the most salient policy example, given residential segregation, homeowner
voters will have reason to favour effective policing outside disadvantaged, high-crime areas and
limited resources for policing in these areas (where victims are poor and are not median voters).
Moreover in so far as these areas have high levels of violent crime and established gangs, they are
extremely costly to police effectively. One can readily see how this may become a self-reinforcing
process: with ineffective policing, violence is liable to increase, further eroding trust in the police
and increasing the costs of ‘community’ policing. In this context, there is a greater temptation to
turn to minimal, or aggressive, quasi-military policing tactics (Goffman 2014; Meares and Kahan
1999).
These policies on zoning, education and policing have strong implications for violent crime, both in
highly segregated poor (largely black and hispanic) tracts and via its spill-over into middle class
areas. In a powerful recent study, Krivo and Petersen have shown how violent crime is strongly
related to highly segregated disadvantaged areas, with large ethnic populations and with a high
10
proportion of high school dropouts, in large ex-manufacturing cities (Peterson and Krivo 2010; Krivo,
Peterson and Kuhl 2009). In an important finding, Krivo and Peterson also show that middle class
areas in cities with high proportions of such poor high violence areas suffer from spillover of violent
crime. Indeed, the violent crime rate in the most advantaged white neighbourhoods in cities with
high segregation is equal to the rate in the least advantaged white neighbourhoods in low
segregation cities (Petersen and Krivo 2010).iii
Why did violent crime rise so dramatically from the late 1960s to the early 1990s in these
disadvantaged areas? Violent crime was relatively low in the early and mid 1960s, then began rising.
It levelled off briefly from 1980 to 1983 and then resumed a rapid rise in the late 1980s till the early
1990s since when it has fallen (Figure 4). Our argument is that the major trends over time are
shaped by the availability of reasonable employment for males from disadvantaged backgrounds in
segregated neighbourhoods. In the early to mid-1960s, the Fordist regime provided, directly and
indirectly, employment even for those with weak educational background and low social capital.
This was because semi-skilled employment on assembly lines required physical skills but limited
analytical or social skills, and unionisation was relatively easy to impose on Fordist employers,
because of the assembly line system. Moreover the semi-skilled had considerable power within
unions because they were necessary to assembly line continuity. So even the disadvantaged shared
in high negotiated wages. Fordism gradually collapsed as a competitive system from the late 1960s
through to the early 1990s. The implications of this can be seen from data in Figure 5 on real hourly
earnings of male workers in 10th and 20th percentiles of the labour force.
11
What explains the collapse in 10th /20th percentile earnings illustrated in Figure 5? The 1970s and
1980s saw a continual middle-class exodus from inner cities, which in itself reduced availability of
low-skill service employment in the inner city. As Fordist jobs were largely eliminated by
automation, new jobs increasingly followed middle classes away from city centres - and increasingly
demanded analytic and social skills. And as middle classes moved away, so socio-employment
networks – which could link those in the inner city with employment opportunities – declined. This
in turn led to the collapse in inner city unskilled earnings. Many of the resulting group of unskilled,
unemployed men were black Americans who had moved relatively recently, in the middle decades
of the 20th Century, from the Jim Crow South to the North in search of work and better opportunities
– before becoming surplus to the requirements of the labour market in the 1970s (Wilson 1987,
1996). The Civil Rights Act was less than a decade old when the economic collapse overtook the
industrial cities; persisting discrimination and segregation in both housing and education meant that
the educational and social disadvantages which African Americans had brought north with them
remained ineffectively tackled.
Why did this cause the huge increase in violent crime? We suggest that there were two types of
causes: lack of (or inappropriate) public policy responses; and individual responses by disadvantaged
males. Taking policy causes first, our suggestion is that these developments made homevoters more
determined to maintain residential segregation; and local democracy allowed these interests to
produce zoning ordinances and their enforcement through zoning boards, with accentuated
segregation contributing to the increase in violence and the social disorganisation which produces it.
Secondly, public education opportunities for disadvantaged youth were determined through school
boards; here again, as disadvantaged youth turned to violence and the alternative economies
offered, for example, by gangs, homevoters became more concerned to reinforce de facto
educational segregation, especially for high schools. Thirdly, home voter interests were also decisive
12
in blocking the investment in serious foot patrols or ‘community’ policing in poor areas, which
accordingly experienced either a vacuum of legitimate law enforcement or aggressive, military-style
policing, often on an intermittent basis (Meares and Kahan 1999). In terms of individual responses,
disadvantaged youths accordingly found themselves in dangerous weakly policed environments, and
street gangs (which had been unimportant before mid-1970s) developed as protection devices, using
violence to protect their turf. This increased with their engagement in the drug market, encouraged
by the ‘War on Drugs’, and was further increased by gang instability as leaders were incarcerated
and new leaders needed to establish a reputation for toughness. Gangs further became involved in
legitimate as well as illegitimate social control, and teamed up with institutions like block clubs,
community associations and churches to provide local goods and security – hence with public local
support and toleration of their illegitimate activities, albeit within limits (Pattillo-McCoy 1999:
chapters 4 and 5). While there is a significant amount of ethnographic work to support this
argument (Venkatesh 2008, Patillo 2007; Hagedorn 1998, 2008), comparable aggregate data on
gangs is poor. However, such data as exists confirms that this was period of major upswing of gangs
(US Youth Gang Survey 2011); and recent research has confirmed that this was also a major period
of growth of prison gangs which were important in areas with big cities (Skarbek 2014).
The juxtaposition of the extremes of wealth and poverty produced by America’s distinctive form of
capitalism, along with the normative force of the ‘American Dream’ combined with the impossibility,
for many, of realising it, have been argued to produce a criminogenic anomie (Messner and
Rosenfeld 2007; Lafree 1998). The dominant explanation of the relationship between segregation,
poverty and crime lies in ‘disorganisation theory’ (Hagan and Peterson 1995; Sampson and Wilson
1995; Sampson and Groves 1989) – the argument that deprivation and in particular concentrations
of deprivation undermine the capacity of communities to sustain norms of order. Crucially for our
thesis, much of that disorganisation in the US is traceable to political decisions at the local level
13
(Hagan and Peterson 1995: 15 23-4; Massey and Denton 1993: 14, 153-60). As Krivo and colleagues
spell out the irony here, the greater the fragmentation and polarisation, the greater the need for
coalition-building to resolve problems, yet the lower the capacity to engage in it (Krivo, Peterson and
Kuhl 2009). In the face of these developments, it is hardly surprising if the middle class median voter
reacted by interpreting crime and indeed poverty as matters of individual responsibility, thus
legitimating their own resistance to voting for expensive strategies such as the improved housing,
better schools and proactive policing (Alexander 2012: 216).
Thus we believe the remarkable upsurge in violent crime through the 1970s and 1980s stemmed
from three factors: ineffectively policed, poor (largely ethnic) residentially and educationally
segregated neighbourhoods – the consequence of local democratic decisions reflecting the interests
of middle-class homeowners; the collapse of Fordist employment and the devaluation of less-skilled
labour which led to mass unemployment of young ethnic males in these segregated neighbourhoods
and sharply reduced returns to legal low-skilled work; and, as social disorder developed, the rapid
growth of gangs, initially as self-protection institutions, where violence was a consequence of turf
war and drug-dealing. These factors as we see it were self-reinforcing as the economy of the inner
cities weakened.
A key element of our underlying argument is that violent crime drives punitiveness which in turn
drives the rate of change of incarceration. We have shown (Figure 4) that (at least in terms of
correlations) this is true at the national level. Moreover Miller (forthcoming) has shown the
relevance of violent crime for the political salience of crime and punishment. Unfortunately we do
not have data for the punitiveness variable at the state or local level, and data for incarceration only
at the state level. So while there is considerable ethnographic and electoral cycle research evidence
14
(already cited) that prosecutors and district judges are responsive to electoral concerns about
spillover violence, this is an area which needs to be further researched before it can be pinned
down. What is known however is that high violent crime in poor neighbourhoods in a city produces a
spillover in violent crime to middle class neighbourhoods; and that this spillover effect is magnified
by increasing levels of violent crime (Petersen and Krivo 2010). Given the relation between spillover
violent crime and the political salience of punishment to which Miller (forthcoming) has pointed, this
seems to offer a potential explanation for the rapid increase in incarceration during the decades of
rising violence. Moreover when violence stopped increasing and began to fall, so too did the
increase in incarceration (Figure 4). Bearing in mind that the change in incarceration is (loosely) the
variable on which policy makers can act – by prosecuting and imprisoning offenders and then by
hastening or not their release – this seems a relevant result. Again it is shaped by local democracy.
We might summarise our thesis by saying that when the poor have a strong presence (Wilson 1987),
these reinforcing policies lead to a ‘bad’ equilibrium; conversely, when the poor are hardly present
‘nice’ communities result from the same dynamics. Our hypothesis would explain how the ‘bad’
equilibrium created fertile conditions for persisting (racially patterned) ghettos, poor schools and
sporadic and/or militarised policing which further attenuated the social structures which would have
been capable of promoting social norms and order (Patillo 2007). The thesis suggests that residential
exclusion further leads to attenuated networks which create further barriers to integration and
social mobility (Royster 2003; cf. Pattillo-McCoy 1999; Charles 2006), and effects damaging black
exclusion from pluralist politics (Massey and Denton: 153-60). The perverse incentives here are
proportionate to the level of disadvantage: the worse the disadvantage, the greater the incentive for
middle class voters to opt for segregation. Evidence for the politically self-sustaining quality of this
equilibrium, even independent of race, can moreover be found in ethnographic research such as
Pattillo’s rich study of the gentrification of a downtown Chicago area, Black on the Block, in which
15
middle class blacks who have invested in housing exhibit much the same concern as their
suburbanite white counterparts about the impact of the lifestyles of their less advantaged
neighbours for property values (Pattillo 2007: Chapters 2 and 6). Furthermore the electoral success
of a significant number of black leaders depends on the concentration of black voters which is
produced by residential segregation – a factor which may have diluted the incentive for black elites
to fight segregation (Massey and Denton 1993: 213-5).
The crime decline and the deceleration of punishment since 1990
Our argument so far suggests that the dynamics of voting and of electoral competition in the
decentralised US system have implied powerful polarising forces, which have given added political
weight to both criminogenic and punitive dynamics. The poor schools, residential segregation and
zoned policing policies produced by local autonomy have, we suggested, combined with the
economic and social upheavals generated by the prolonged collapse of Fordist semi-skilled
employment for males to produce social disorganisation. And social disorganisation is associated
with high levels of crime (Sampson 1987; Sampson and Groves 1989; Sampson and Wilson 1995).
But two obvious questions can be raised about this thesis: First, how can the marked decline in
violent crime since the 1990s be explained? Second, while the marked decline in violence has indeed
led to a corresponding decline in our measure of punitiveness (Enns 2014: see Figure 4), how are we
to explain the continuing rise in the rate of incarceration until very recently?
So why did violent crime start to decline in the 1990s? The gradual development of a knowledge
economy combined with the prolonged period of growth and low inflation in the US and elsewhere
from the early 1990s to the financial crisis (the ‘Great Moderation’) generated a major population
shift back especially into the largest cities where growth in high skill industries has been
16
concentrated. Florida’s important work on the ‘Creative Classes’ (Florida 2002), as well as Glaeser
and colleagues’ work on skill clusters (Chatterji, Glaeser et al. 2013), help to explain the
gentrification of inner city areas during this period. We hypothesise that this co-movement of
economic growth and of young professionals into the inner city led to declining crime for three
interrelated reasons. First, as Figure 5 demonstrates, it decisively raised real hourly earnings of
unskilled male workers (10th percentile) as a corollary of the need for unskilled work to complement
the emerging skill clusters. Second, with rising population in city centres, actual residential
segregation declined between 1990 and 2000 (Massey and Rothwell 2009). This in turn transformed
the political dynamics, in that the new residents wanted effective policing of these areas including
city centres. Recent research by Sharp (2013) has shown econometrically across a range of
metropolitan areas that the key variables in determining the importance of ‘Order Maintenance’
policing are, first, the percentage of ‘creative classes’ or other measures of post-industrial
development and, second, police use of surveys of citizen concern on crime and disorder to guide
police deployment. Our tentative argument is therefore that violent crime declines (in the cities
where it does) for fundamentally political-economic reasons; and that these political, economic and
demographic developments are already having significant effects on the dynamics of local
democracy.
If the new political-economic dynamics have had decisive implications for crime, however, the
polarising dynamic of American local politics remains evident. For those unable or unwilling to play
by the rules of the newly refurbished cities, or whose presence promotes feelings of insecurity
among residents or those spending money on property investment, retail or leisure activities, new
kinds of zoning regulation have been created. These regulations take the form of local civil, criminal
and planning laws to ‘banish’ the troublesome from middle class areas (Beckett and Herbert 2009).
17
We can loosely test this broad explanation, since not all very large cities benefited from falling
violent crime from the 1990s. The effects upon crime are suggested by Figure 6: of the largest cities
outside the South, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington DC all saw falling violent
crime from the early 1990s on, while their population grew; Philadelphia,iv Detroit, Milwaukee and
Baltimore did not have declining violent crime (at least until the 2000s), and did have continuing
population decline.
It can be seen from Figure 4 that the decline in violent crime since the early 1990s has been
associated with a fall in the Enns (2014) punitiveness index, which measures changing attitudes to
the rate of change of incarceration over time, and compares this with both public attitudes to crime
and rates of violent crime. Incarceration has gone on rising, so does that mean that the link
between punitiveness and policy responses via incarceration has been broken? There is good reason
to think otherwise. For the continuing increase in the imprisonment rate is driven by many factors
which are not readily within policy-makers’ control – notably the continuing impact of increased
numbers of long term prisoners on the global number. So the relevant policy response which we
would expect to see if there is indeed a link between crime, punitiveness and imprisonment is rather
an effort to change the rate of incarceration, by operating either on new admissions to prison or on
releases. As can be seen in Figure 4, the rate of change in imprisonment, after rising sharply through
the 1970s and 1980s, began to fall equally fast. This suggests that the effect of crime on
punitiveness and the effect of punitiveness on policy on imprisonment have remained very much in
place, albeit that institutional path dependence and the accretion of commercial interests in the
prison system may well have slowed the deceleration of imprisonment to some extent (Gottschalk
2014: 25-74). Furthermore, the rate of change remained positive until recently, with rising
incarceration (although significantly lower for violent crime). This is an area for future research, but
18
some part of the explanation is likely to do with the more intensive policing of urban centers (often
oriented to ‘banishment’ of the homeless or otherwise troublesome: Beckett and Herbert 2009).
Centralised vs local democracy: American crime, punishment and democracy in comparative
perspective
We have already suggested that the power of homevoters - people particularly motivated to vote
out of concern with ensuring policies which protect the value of their primary asset - (Fischel 2001,
2004, 2005), in the American system of local democracy may hold an important key to
understanding the distinctive dynamics of crime and punishment. And we know that ‘homevoters’
turn out to vote in much higher numbers than others (Hajnal and Trounstein 2005), resulting in a
more advantaged median voter at local level. Particularly given low turnout and homevoter
interests, median voters at local level are hence likely to be considerably to the right of median
voters at federal or even state level (Hajnal and Trounstine 2005: 16-17; Cutler, Glaeser and Vigdor
1999). They are also more likely to be significantly concerned about the impact of crime on property
values and the quality of local services such as education than general survey respondents. It is
therefore a significant problem that most evaluations of the political impact of concern about crime
are based on generalised survey evidence (e.g. Beckett 1997). Our hypothesis is that the
homevoters who have so much power in local elections are in a position to co-opt the local state,
which in effect operates in their private interests.
But why should this ‘homevoter’ effect be so powerful in the United States, leading to unique levels
of residential segregation (Peach 1996; Johnston et al 2007; Reardon and Bischoff 2011)? Two
considerations are important, and differentiate the United States from comparable countries such as
the United Kingdom. The first has to do with the structure of the labour market and of pensions
19
provision. The motivation of the median voter is almost certainly strongly affected by concern about
property values in other countries where home ownership is widespread, as is the case in most
liberal market economies. But in the US the home represents not only the largest personal
investment for many middle class families, but also their pension pot, as compared with more
complete public and occupational pension provision in the less flexibilised liberal market economies.
Growing rates of home ownership through the second half of the Twentieth Century have increased
the relevant dynamics (Simon 2010).
The second consideration follows from the fact that the main mechanism by which segregation is
achieved is that of zoning – a key form of autonomous political power at the local level ever since
the Supreme Court ruled on the legality of zoning ordinances in 1926.v By contrast to the localised
basis for zoning, education and policing decisions in the US, all the key rules governing zoning, police
organisation and practice, justice, public prosecution, and the education system are made primarily
at the national or provincial level in other liberal market economies such as Canada, the UK and New
Zealand (Figure 3). This may help to explain the striking differences between the US and other liberal
market economies which have also struggled with issues of inner city decline and unemployment
following the collapse of Fordist production in the 1970s. Despite the ‘prisoners’ dilemma’ effects
attendant on national governments’ competing for median voters, more centralised systems, our
thesis would suggest, avoid the negative externalities of local decision-making characteristic of the
US. This is because of an important difference in the typical interests of median voters – and hence
of politicians – at national as opposed to local level, even leaving the demographic differences just
discussed aside. The idea that people are more likely to vote for public goods at the national than at
the state or local levels seems counter-intuitive given evidence that more homogeneous groups are
more likely to vote for collective goods (Alesina, Baqir and Easterly 1999). However, it makes sense if
one assumes a mobile society in which people vote at the national level for goods from which they
20
will benefit wherever they live. Conversely, at the local level people will be inclined to vote only for
things from which they can be guaranteed to benefit – hence voters are less likely to vote for long
term investment, notably in education, where the benefits accruing may then move elsewhere. Local
voters, in short, have an incentive to ‘capture’ the benefits of social policy by restricting their
support to policies from which they are sure to benefit. Under conditions of relative homogeneity,
this becomes a less pressing concern. But the extensiveness of local electoral government means
that arrangements which are in the interests of politically powerful swing voters – themselves drawn
from more advantaged groups - can more readily be inscribed in public policy.
If it is true that the positive externalities – the expectations that they may benefit from widely
diffused goods - mean that voters are more likely to vote for public goods at higher levels of
government, especially the national level, it would follow that localities make a poor basis for long
term policy-making let alone redistribution. (Indeed many progressive reforms at state level through
US history have been motivated by the recognition that local decision-making performs poorly in
terms of redistribution: Zackin 2013: 103). And while there has been some progress in the US,
especially at the state level, in mounting legal challenges to impose uniform standards in education –
notably in decoupling school spending from local property tax revenues (a strategy which itself
ultimately depended on state enforcement (Corcoran et al 2003)) – housing and zoning policies
remain strongly shaped by local interests, with devastating effects for efforts at desegregation, in
both class and race terms. Even in the area of education, litigation strategies have had mixed success
(Douglas 2005; Frankenberg and Orfield (eds.) 2012), with network-based inequalities rooted in
factors such as private/parental contributions to school infrastructure and variations in teacher
standards persisting even in the face of some political successes at the state level in increasing
overall per capita spending. The continuing battle to counter voting restrictions likely
21
disproportionately to exclude the disadvantaged is testimony to the power of the relevant interests
here.
The structure of local government and in particular of ‘city trenches’ in the US is well known to have
accorded power to ‘in-groups’ (typically those with property, strongly associated with race, for
obvious reasons). Early city politics ran on ethnic lines, and provided a strong basis for reproduction
of group/sectoral identities and ethnic separation (Katznelson 1981: 104ff, 80ff). Newer local
political structures such as school boards have in many ways reproduced the old group-based
Tammany Hall structures.vi The scope of local autonomy is such that huge regional and intra-state
differences of what would in more centralized countries be stabilized by public provision and
national regulation can emerge. In the UK, for example, policing, education and planning all go
forward within a national legislative framework, with modest provision for local control/variation. In
Canada, these policies are largely framed at Province level, while even voter preferences for more
localised city government have on occasion been overridden by provincial legislatures in the
interests of better co-ordination of policy (Mitchell-Weaver et al 2000:865). In the ‘balkanised’
(Miller 2010; Orfield 2002) local government of the US, multiple jurisdictions do not have to consider
effects on other jurisdictions. Yet more importantly, the fact that elections are decided by a
relatively small group of ‘median’ voters means that the ‘truly disadvantaged’ are rarely heard at the
ballot box even if they vote, and that this problem becomes more intractable the greater the degree
of inequality and concentration of disadvantage. Again, this is confirmed by empirical research:
Pattillo’s black ‘middlemen’ lost power (Pattillo 2007) due to demographic changes and the collapse
of Fordism.
22
That the voices of the disadvantaged tend to be muted in electoral politics, and that that
disadvantage itself was accentuated by the collapse of Fordism is, of course, true in all the
industrialised democracies. What is special about the US, however, is the degree to which the
structure of the political system has allowed these widespread facts to issue in distinctively
polarising policy. Our thesis implies that local autonomy in the US means that wealthier groups can
opt out of collective problems via the construction of gated communities or the purchase of private
education or private security: they can even incorporate within a new city with its own zoning laws.
But, yet more importantly, local autonomy means that the local state itself can be invoked for similar
structural purposes. In other words, zoning decisions, public housing policy, policing and school
funding can be organised in the interests of the middle classes who swing elections. Hence to the
extent that their interests have become more different, and that they view their fate as more and
more independent from that of the disadvantaged, support for redistribution to the latter becomes
ever harder to motivate. Moreover this would not be changed by a greater emphasis on local
democracy or a change in constituency boundaries. For even granting Miller’s (2008) finding that
high victimisation/high crime groups such as poor inner city blacks have a more sophisticated view of
crime policy than do more privileged groups, to implement the sorts of policies which that
sophisticated view would endorse – better housing, education and employment – would require
resources. And these resources in turn depend to a significant extent – particularly in the wake of
the federal funding cuts and squeezed state budgets of recent years - on a local tax base which
would be severely attenuated. There is an irony here: in this markedly anti-statist democracy, it
seems that the local state has become a powerful medium for realising private interests. Our
suggestion is that these decentralisation effects, though they vary according to specific state
structures (Barker 2009), are sufficiently pervasive to constitute a key part of the explanation for
American exceptionalism.
One further aspect of decentralisation bears on our explanatory hypothesis about America’s
distinctive problems of criminal violence, punitiveness and polarising social policy: the coordination
23
problem implicit in reliance on legal enforcement, often at local level, to implement national or state
policy. As the Great Society and New Deal Programmes of the mid 20th Century attest – an era,
incidentally, which saw drops in the homicide rate (Hall and McLean 2009) – the US can develop
significant national policies in areas such as education, housing and criminal justice. President
Obama’s Affordable Care Act provides a more recent example. But the federal government can push
forward nationwide policy objectives only within certain constitutional constraints and under certain
conditions: either where a party with a clear programme has control of Congress as well as the
Presidency, or where there is cross-partisan consensus. Where there is neither this power nor this
consensus at federal level, everything turns on states or localities. And even when federal initiatives
are brokered, implementation largely rests on action at the state and local levels (Feeley and Sarat
1980). In the absence of powerful agencies or plentiful funding to provide economic incentives,
implementation furthermore has to be triggered either by legal enforcement or by local political will
(Lacey and Soskice forthcoming).
Law is often regarded as a particularly salient resource to counter the discriminatory effects of public
power in the US. But local autonomy means that law can often be subverted to the interests of the
relatively advantaged. For the democratic choice at local level of local judges and district attorneys
blunts what has been seen as the primary resort of minorities whose rights have been abused by the
political will of local majorities, namely the US Constitution and the Constitutions of the several
states. ‘Legal adversarialism’ (Kagan 2001) has undoubtedly put tools into the hands of litigants
with the resourcefulness (and resources) to challenge outcomes such as educational segregation or
housing discrimination. However, the democratic choice of justices at the local level makes effective
implementation of standards against local majority will difficult, even leaving aside pathologies of
legal adversarialism such as high costs, delays, patchy impact and ineffectiveness at the level of
implementation (Frankenberg, Lee and Orfield 2003; Douglas 2005; Frankenberg and Orfield (eds.)
24
2012). And this in turn – notwithstanding, and indeed in some ways evidenced by, the limitations of
the various programmes rolled out under the aegis of the New Deal and the Great Society in the 20th
Century – relates to an underlying structural difficulty for the Presidency to establish micro-
governing, rule-implementing federal bureaucracies across the US (Feeley and Sarat 1980). The US
system moreover features lower status bureaucracies, and a lower overall level of trust in expertise,
than other comparable countries (Savelsberg 1994, 1999). Lessons from school segregation and civil
rights history show that while litigation strategies can achieve real progress, they are both costly and
divisive: they provide an adversarial framework for policy implementation, while individual case-
based legal remedies or even class actions are rarely effective to resolve structural or coordination
problems (Kagan 2001; Douglas 2005; Aaronson 2015). Hence this distinctively American translation
of political activism into legal strategy has significant disadvantages. It is no surprise that law has
come to assume such dominance in the American system: it makes sense that the more
individualistic and fragmented the society, the more likely it will be to resort to legal enforcement
which does not depend on compromise and negotiation, hence bypassing structural problems of
coordination. But these problems, inevitably, reproduce themselves at the implementation level,
with key recent examples including the lack of enforcement powers under the Fair Housing Act
(Massey and Denton 1993: 14-15, 187, 223-30, 206 ff ) and the notoriously long-running Gautreaux
litigation in Chicago (Pattillo 2007: 110-4; Peterson and Krivo 2010: Chapter 5). These difficulties
have become more acute in an era of declining funding for agency enforcement (Pierson and
Skocpol 2007).
Conclusion
25
Our hypothesis about what explains the exceptional character of American crime and punishment
turns, then, on the nature of the US political system. But we have not centred our analysis on the
features of the American system which generally capture attention: its federal structure, its
distinctive constitution, its powerful system of judicial review or its distinctive reliance on legal
solutions to political problems. Rather, we have focused on institutional arrangements which have
drawn little comment from criminologists and sociologists of crime and punishment: the United
States’ weak party discipline under conditions of declining voter partisanship and, above all, its
peculiarly decentralised character, which obstructs the development of national criminal justice
policy while allowing for varying local solutions which tend towards significant regional variation;
and which disproportionately reflect the interests of the relatively advantaged, and of homeowners
in particular. In the context of the significant demographic shifts which affected many cities in the
run-up to the collapse of Fordist production in the 1970s, the decentralised political system has
arguably led to increasing polarisation of housing quality, education quality, policing styles and social
provision in and around American cities. In parallel, economic forces and technological change have
led to similar polarisation in working life, and gangs have provided alternative paths to peer approval
and meaningful activity, particularly for many young black and Hispanic men (US Youth Gang Survey
2011). Our suggestion is that, taken together, these political, economic and social dynamics created
a powerful centrifugal force which, up to the 1990s, significantly increased crime, insecurity and
punishment in the least advantaged sectors of the population, while also increasing their poverty
and the extent of their geographical and social isolation. The inevitable upshot, to paraphrase
Peterson and Krivo (2010), is an ever more divergent social, economic and spatial world, and the
development of what we might call ‘alternative social and political economies’ – parallel worlds of
work, social interaction and social control, most vividly in the example of gangs – competing,
colliding and, on occasion, co-operating with the legitimate economy and the conventional social
order.
26
If our argument is persuasive, it follows that there is a significant empirical research challenge to be
met in criminal justice scholarship: to further investigate electoral cycle effects; patterns of local
implementation of state and federal provisions; and the impact of local decisions on zoning, policing
and education. Our thesis also has significant policy implications, suggesting for example that it
would be a mistake to conclude, as some scholars have (Stuntz 2011), that the solution to the
problems of crime and punishment is a rejuvenation of local democracy, let alone to think that an
increase in direct electoral accountability equates to a better quality of democratic governance. An
analysis of the distribution of voter preferences within the decentralised US system in fact suggests
the very different conclusion that the diffusion and localisation of democracy has been a powerful
institutional factor in shaping America’s distinctive patterns of crime, punishment, segregation and
indeed social inequality. The ‘truly disadvantaged’ groups, mainly located in inner city areas or poor
suburbs, whose victimisation at the hands of both crime and criminal justice underpins their more
complex view of crime and punishment (Miller 2008), are rarely the median or decisive voters in the
electoral contests which shape policy . The recent history of increasing racial and socio-economic
polarization, in both economic and spatial terms, much of it driven by zoning regulations and median
voter concern with property values, gives the lie to any thought that greater localisation spells more
equal criminal justice. Radical local autonomy is, in short, one important source of the ills of
American criminal justice, and not a recipe for its cure.
This thesis would also, finally, help to explain the extraordinary scalar and qualitative difference
between criminal justice and other social policy outcomes in post-1970 America as compared with
other liberal market countries. Democratic local autonomy plays a much smaller role in the rest of
the Anglo-Saxon world: indeed, the contrast between this radical decentralization and the national
frameworks within which planning, education and criminal justice policy proceed in other liberal
market economies can hardly be exaggerated. Framework rules and laws governing all the policy
27
areas discussed in this paper - public education, zoning, police, public prosecution and justice - are
made at the level of central government (England and Wales, and New Zealand) or at
provincial/state and partially federal levels (Australia and Canada). It remains to be seen whether
the British Conservative Party’s ‘Big Society’ agenda, or the Labour Party’s localism agenda, will
make significant changes in the decentralized American direction. In the event that they do so, our
argument would lead us to expect adverse effects on poverty, educational inequality, spatial
segregation, crime, punishment and relative disadvantage in England and Wales.
Figure 1: Imprisonment Trends in Europe and the USA, 1950-2010
28
n
Source: International Centre for Prison Studies (2010) World Prison Brief; John Pratt
(2008)‘Scandinavian Exceptionalism in an Era of Penal Excess’
Figure 2: Levels of Political Decision-making in Liberal Market Economies
Police Prosecutors Local
judges
Zoning Schools
US City/municipal
appointment
by mayor
(sometimes
elected)
DA elected
county or
multi-
county
district
Most
states
elected on
county or
multi-
Zoning Boards
appointed by
locally elected
Council/Mayor
Property
tax by
elected
School
Board at
29
county
district
School
District
Canada Office of
Provincial AG;
operating
procedures,
appointments,
training
Provincial
AG
Provincial
government
Provincial,
Federal
defined
policies
Provincial
policies
England
and
Wales
Home Office
appoints Chief
Constables
Attorney
General
(government
agency)
Lord
Chancellor
(Ministry of
Justice)
Min Housing
rules, right of
appeal to
Minister
National
government
policies
NZ Government
appoints
(under
Minister of
Police,
prosecution
independence)
Attorney
General
appoints
(remain
private
lawyers)
national
guidelines
Attorney
General
National
guidelines
National
system
(Ministry of
Education)
30
31
32
Figure 3 : American Exceptionalism in Adverse Social Outcomes
United
States
United
Kingdom
Australia New
Zealand
Canada Sweden
Residential
Segregation:
(Ethnic)
10.8
[11.4]
Black
1.7
[9.9]
S Asian
0.1
[2.7]
Asian
0.0
[19.6]
Maori
1.4
[11.2]
Asian
Prison per cap 701 141 115 155 129 73
Homicide rate 5.0 1.2 1.2 1.5 1.8 1.0
Literacy score
5th percentile
136.7 151.2 145.1 164.8 144.5 214
Child poverty 23.1 12.1 10.9 11.7 13.3 7.3
Source: Ron Johnston, Michael Poulsen and James Forrest (2005) ‘Ethnic Residential Segregation
Across an Urban System: The Maori in New Zealand 1991-2001’; International Centre for Prison
Studies (accessed 2010) World Prison Brief; OECD (accessed 2013) ‘Literacy in the Information
Age’; Unicef (accessed 2013) ‘Measuring Child Poverty’; UNODC (accessed 2013) Homicide
statistics.
Notes:
33
(1) Residential segregation: % population in large cities living in tracts where (a) > 70% ethnic (non-
white), (b) one ethnic group dominant, (c) > 30% of group in city live in these tracts. The number in
[] is % of main ethnic group in cities analysed. 2001-2 Johnston et al2007
(2) Prison data 2002-3; 2004 Canada
(3) International Adult Literacy Survey 2000 OECD
(4) Unicef, 2012
(5) Homicide rate 2009
(6) Note that black % in US big city sample is < % in US population (because of South), while Maori
% >; both around 15% of population
(7) Prison per capita in US, male and female, includes jail.
(8) % children 0-17 in households disposable income (corrected for family size/comp)< 50%
median.
34
Figure 4: Violent Crime Rate, Punitiveness Opinion Index and Change in Incarceration Rate, 1960-
2010 (Violent crime rates, UCR data; change in incarceration rate data and public opinion data,
Enns (2014).
35
Figure 5: Hourly real earnings male employees by deciles, 1973-2009
36
Figure 6: Change in Aggravated Assault Rate and in Population, 7 Largest non-Southern Cities,
1990-2009 (Aggravated assault rates, UCR data; population change, census data and population
estimates)
37
References
Aaronson, Ely (2015), From Slave Abuse to Hate Crime: The Criminalization of Racial Violence in
American History New York: Cambridge University Press
Alesina, Alberto, Reza Baqir and William Easterly (1999) ‘Public Goods and Ethnic Divisions’ 114
Quarterly Journal of Economics 1243-84
Alexander, Michelle (2012) The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colourblindness
New York: The New Press
Barker, V. (2009) The Politics of Punishment: How the Democratic Process Shapes the Way America
Punishes Offenders New York: Oxford University Press
Beckett, Katherine (1997) Making Crime Pay, New York: Oxford University Press.
Beckett, Katherine and Steve Herbert (2009) Banished: The New Social Control in Urban America,
New York: Oxford University Press
Berdejó, Carlos, and Noam Yuchtman. "Crime, punishment, and politics: an analysis of political cycles
in criminal sentencing." Review of Economics and Statistics 95.3 (2013): 741-756
Boggess, Scott and John Bound, ‘Did Criminal Activity Increase During the 1980s? Comparisons
across Data Sources’, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper no. 4431 (1993)
Bogira, Steve (2005) Courtroom 302, New York: Vintage Books
Brooks R.R. and S. Raphael. 2002. Life terms or death sentences: The uneasy relationship between
judicial elections and capital punishment. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology: 609-640
38
Campbell, Michael C. (2012) ‘Ornery alligators and soap on a rope: Texas prosecutors and
punishment reform in the Lone Star State’ DOI: 10.1177/1362480611416842 Theoretical
Criminology 2012 16: 289
Charles, Camille Zubrinksy (2006) Won’t You Be My Neighbour? New York: Russell Sage
Chatterji, A., E. Glaeser et al (2013) Clusters of Entrepreneurship and Innovation National Bureau of
Economic Research
Chubb, John E. (1988) ‘Institutions, The Economy, and the Dynamics of State Elections’ American
Political Science Review 82, No. 1: 133-154
Corcoran, Sean, William N Evans, Jennifer Godwin, Sheila E Marry, Robert M Schwab (2003) The
Changing Distribution of Education Finance 1972-1997,New York: Russell Sage
Cutler, David M., Edward L. Glaeser, Jacob L Vigdor (1999), ‘The Rise and decline of the American
Ghetto’ Journal of Political Economy 107 455-506
Douglas, Davison M. (2005) Jim Crow Moves North: The Battle over Northern School Segregation
1865-1954 New York: Cambridge University Press
Dyke, Andrew (2007) ‘Electoral cycles in the administration of criminal justice’, Public Choice 133:
417-37
Esping-Andersen, G. (1990) The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism Cambridge: Polity Press.
Feeley, Malcom and Austin Sarat (1980) The Policy Dilemma: Federal Crime Policy and the Law
Enforcement Assistance Administration Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
Enns, Peter K. (2014) ‘The Public’s Increasing Punitiveness and its Influence on Mass Incarceration in
the United States American Journal of Political Science 1-16
39
Fischel, William A. (2005) ‘Politics in a Dynamic View of Land-Use Regulations: Of Interest Groups
and Homevoters’ 31:4 The Journal or Real Estate, Finance and Economics 395-403
Fischel, William A. (2004) ‘An Economic History of Zoning and a Cure for its Exclusionary Effects’ 41
Urban Studies 317-340
Fischel, William A. (2001) The Homevoter Hypothesis Cambridge: Harvard University Press
Florida, R.L. (2002) The Rise of the Creative Class New York: Basic Books
Frankenberg Erica, Chungmei Lee and Gary Orfield (2003) A Multiracial Society with Segregated
Schools: Are We Losing the Dream? The Civil Rights Project, Harvard University
http://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/k-12-education/integration-and-diversity/a-multiracial-
society-with-segregated-schools-are-we-losing-the-dream/frankenberg-multiracial-society-losing-
the-dream.pdf
Frankenberg Erica and Gary Orfield (eds.) (2012) The Resegregation of Suburban Schools: A Hidden
Crisis in American Education Harvard Education Press
Gallo, Zelia, Nicola Lacey and David Soskice (forthcoming) ‘Comparing Serious Violent Crime in the
US and England and Wales: Why it matters, and how it can be done’ in Kevin Reitz (ed.) American
Exceptionalism in Crime and Punishment New York: Oxford University Press
Garland, D. (2001) The Culture of Control, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Garland, David (2010) Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition New York:
Oxford University Press and Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press
Garland, D. (2013) ‘Penality and the Penal State’ 51 Criminology 475-517
Goffman, Alice (2014) On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City Chicago: University of Chicago
Press
40
Gordon, S.C. and Huber, G. (2007) ‘The Effect of electoral competitiveness on incumbent behaviour’
Quarterly Journal of Political Science 2 (2): 107-138
Gottschalk, Marie (2014) Caught: the Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics Princeton
University Press
Hagan, John and Ruth D. Peterson (eds.) (1995) Crime and Inequality Palo Alto: Stanford University
Press
Hagan, John and Ruth D. Peterson (1995) ‘Criminal Inequality in America: Patterns and
Consequences’, in Hagan, John and Ruth D. Peterson (eds.) (1995) pp. 14-36
Hagedorn, John M. (1998) People and Folks: Gangs, Crime and the Underclass in a Rustbelt City
Chicago: Lake View Press
Hagedorn, John M. (2008) A World of Gangs: Armed Young Men and Gangsta Culture, University of
Minnesota Press
Hajnal ,Zoltan and Jessica Trounstine (2005) ‘Where turnout Matters: The consequences of Uneven
Turnout in City Politics’ 67 Journal of Politics 515-35
Hall, P.A. and Soskice, D. (2001) ‘An Introduction to the Varieties of Capitalism’, in P.A. Hall and D.
Soskice (eds) Varieties of Capitalism Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1-68.
Hall, Steve and Craig McLean. 2009. A tale of two capitalisms: Preliminary spatial and historical
comparisons of homicide rates in Western Europe and the USA. Theoretical Criminology 13: 313-339.
Huber, G. and S.C. Gordon. 2004. Accountability and Coercion: Is justice blind when it runs for
office? American Journal of Political Science 48: 247-263
41
Johnston, Ron, Michael Poulsen and James Forrest (2007) ‘The geography of ethnic residential
segregation: a comparative study of five countries’ 97 Annals of the Association of American
Geographers 713-38
Kagan, Robert A. (2001) Adversarial Legalism: The American Way of Law Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press
Katznelson, Ira (1981) City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States
Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Krivo, Lauren J., Ruth D. Peterson and Danielle C. Kuhl (2009) ‘Segregation, Racial Structure, and
Neighbourhood Violent Crime ‘ American Journal of Sociology 114:1765-1802
Lacey, Nicola (2008) The Prisoners' Dilemma: Political Economy and Punishment in Contemporary
Democracies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lacey, Nicola and David Soskice (forthcoming), ‘American Exceptionalism in Crime, Punishment and
Disadvantage: Race, Federalisation and Politicisation in the Perspective of Local Autonomy’ in Kevin
Reitz (ed.), American Exceptionalism in Crime and Punishment New York: Oxford University Press.
Lafree, Gary (1998) Losing Legitimacy: Street Crime and the Decline of Social Institutions in America
1946-96 New York: Basic Books.
Levitt, Stephen D (1997) ‘Using Electoral Cycles in Police Hiring to Estimate the Effect of Police on
Crime’, The American Economic Review 87: 270-90.
Lijphart, Arend (1999) Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six
Countries New Haven: Yale University Press
Lijphart, Arend (1984) Democracies: Patterns of Majoritarian and Consensus Governments in
Twenty-one Countries New Haven: Yale University Press
42
Lynch, Mona (2010) Sunbelt Justice: Arizona and the Transformation of American Democracy
Stanford University Press
Massey, Douglas S. and Nancy A. Denton (1993) American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of
the Underclass Cambridge: Harvard University Press
Meares, Tracey L. and Dan M. Kahan, (1999) Urgent Times: Policing and Rights in Inner City
Communities (New York: Random House)
Steven F. Messner and Richard Rosenfeld (2007) Crime and the American Dream (4th edition,
Belmont CA, Wadsworth)
Miller, Lisa L. (2008) The Perils of Federalism: Race, Poverty, and the Politics of Crime Control New
York: Oxford University Press.
Miller, Lisa L. (2010) ‘The Invisible black victim: how American federalism perpetuates racial
inequality in criminal justice’ Law and Society Review 44: 805-42
Miller, Lisa L. (forthcoming) ‘What’s Violence Got To Do with It? Rethinking punishment, Inequality
and the Modern American State
Mitchell-Weaver, Clyde, David Miller and Ronald Deal Jr, (2000) ‘Multilevel Governance and
metropolitan regionalism in the USA’ 37 Urban Studies 851-76
Orfield, Myron (2002) American Metropolitics Washington: Brookings Institution Press
Pattillo-McCoy, Mary (1999) Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Classes
Chicago: Chicago University Press
Pattillo, Mary (2007) Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City Chicago: Chicago
University Press
Peach, Ceri (1996) ‘Does Britain have Ghettos?’ Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
21 216-35
43
Peterson, Ruth D. and Lauren J. Krivo (2010) Divergent Social Worlds: Neighbourhood Crime and the
Racial-Spatial Divide New York: Russell Sage
John F. Pfaff (2012) ‘The Micro and Macro Causes of Prison Growth’ Georgia State University Law
Review 1139
Pierson, Paul and Theda Skocpol (2007) The Transformation of American Politics: Activist
Government and the Rise of Conservatism Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
Plunkett, Leah A. (2013) “Captive Markets,” 65 Hastings Law Journal
Reardon, Sean F. and Kendra Bischoff (2011) Growth in the Residential Segregation of Families by
Income, 1970-2009 (US2010 Project: Russell Sage Foundation)
Rothwell, Jonathan and Douglas S. Massey (2009) ‘The Effect of Density Zoning on Racial Segretation
in U.S. Urban Areas’ 44 Urban Affairs Review 779-806
Royster, Deidre A. (2003) Race and the Invisible Hand: How White Networks Exclude Blacks from
Blue Collar Jobs, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press
Sampson, Robert J. (1987) ‘Urban Black Violence: The Effect of Male Joblessness and Family
Disruption’ 93 American Journal of Sociology 348-382
Sampson, Robert J. and W. Byron Groves (1989) ‘Community Structure and Crime: Testing Social-
Disorganisation Theory’ 94 American Journal of Sociology 774-802
Sampson, Robert J. and William Julius Wilson (1995) ‘Toward A Theory of Race, Crime and Urban
Inequality’, in Hagan, John and Ruth D. Peterson (eds.) (1995) pp. 37-54
Savelsberg, J.J (1994) ‘Knowledge, Domination, and Criminal Punishment’, American Journal of
Sociology, 99, 911-43.
44
Savelsberg, J.J. (1999) ‘Knowledge, Domination and Criminal Punishment Revisited’, Punishment and
Society, 1, 45-70.
Scheingold, Stuart A. (2010) The Politics of Law and Order: Street Crime and Public Policy New
Orleans: Quid Pro Books (first published 1989)
Sharp, Elaine (2013) ‘Politics, Economics, and Urban Policing: The Postindustrial Thesis and Rival
Explanations of Heightened Order Maintenance Policing 50 Urban Affairs Review 340-365
Shepherd, Joanna M. (2009) ‘The Influence of Retention Politics on Judges’ Voting’ 38 Journal of
Legal Studies 169
Simon, J. (2007) Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American
Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear, New York: Oxford University Press.
Simon, Jonathan (2010) ‘Consuming Obsessions: Housing, Homicide, and Mass Incarceration since
1950’, The University of Chicago Legal Forum 141-180.
Skarbek, David (2014) The Social Order of the Underworld Oxford: Oxford University Press 2014
Smith, K. B. (2004) ‘The politics of punishment’, Journal of Politics 66(3): 925-938.
Soskice, D. (2009) ‘American Exceptionalism and Comparative Political Economy’, in Clair Brown,
Barry Eichengreen and Michael Reich (eds). Labor in the Era of Globalization New York: Cambridge
University Press, 51-93
Stuntz, W.J. (2001) ‘The Pathological Politics of Criminal Law’ 100 Michigan Law Review 505-600
Stuntz, William J. (2011) The Collapse of American Criminal Justice Cambridge: Harvard University
Press
Tonry, M. (2004) Thinking about Crime: Sense and Sensibility in American Penal Culture , New York:
Oxford University Press
45
UNICEF (2012) ‘Measuring child poverty. New league tables of child poverty in the world’s richest
countries’, Innocenti Report Card 10, (Peter, Adamson; UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre)
UNODC (2012) Homicide statistics, http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-
analysis/homicide.html
US Bureau of Justice Statistics (2006) Inmates at Midyear 2006
US Bureau of Justice Statistics (2010) Prisoners in 2010 (Paul Guerino, Paige M. Harrison and William
J. Sabol)
US Department of Justice (2011) US Youth Gang Survey 2011
http://www.ojjdp.gov/pubs/242884.pdf (accessed 14/10/14)
Venkatesh, Sudhir (2008) Gang Leader for a Day. New York: The Penguin Press.
Wacquant, Loïc (2009) Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity, Durham:
Duke University Press
Western, B. (2006) Punishment and Inequality in America New York: Russell Sage.
Whitman, J.Q. (2003) Harsh Justice Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wilson, William Julius (1987) The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass and Public
Policy Chicago: Chicago University Press
Wilson, William Julius (1996) When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor New York:
Knopf
Yates, J. and R. Fording (2005) "Politics and state punitiveness in black and white", Journal of Politics
67(4): 1099-1121.
Zackin, Emily (2013) Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Places Princeton: Princeton University Press
Zimring, Franklin E., Gordon Hawkins and Sam Kamin (2001) Punishment and Democracy: Three
Strikes and You’re Out in California New York: Oxford University Press
Zimring, Franklin E. (2007) The Great American Crime Decline Oxford: Oxford University Press
Zimring, Franklin E. (2012) The City that Became Safe Oxford: Oxford University Press
46
Nicola Lacey is School Professor of Law, Gender and Social Policy, London School of Economics, and
author of The Prisoners’ Dilemma: Punishment and Political Economy in Contemporary Democracies
(2008) and, most recently, with Hanna Pickard, of ‘The Chimera of Proportionality: Institutionalising
Limits on Punishment in Contemporary Social and Political Systems’, (2015) 78(2) Modern Law
Review 216-240; David Soskice is School Professor of Political Science and Economics, London School
of Economics; he edited, with Peter Hall, Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of
Comparative Advantage (2001) and is the author of, most recently, with Wendy Carlin,
Macroeconomics: Institutions, Instability and the Financial System, (Oxford University Press, Oxford,
2015; pp 638 + xl) and,with Torben Iversen, ‘Democratic Limits to Redistribution: Inclusionary versus
Exclusionary Reforms in the Knowledge Economy’, World Politics, 2015 (67), 2, April, pp 185-225
Our warm thanks go to Lisa Miller for helpful discussion, advice and feedback; to audiences at the
Robina Institute, University of Minnesota Law School; Oxford University; the London School of
Economics (Law Department and Mannheim Centre for Criminology); the Inequality seminar at the
Kennedy School, Harvard, and Harvard Law School; to Ely Aaaronson, Christopher Jencks, Desmond
King, Ian Loader, George Molyneaux, Christopher Muller, Tim Newburn, Robert Reiner, Kevin Reitz,
Carol Sanger, Carol Steiker and Seth Stoughton and two reviewers for Punishment and Society for
comments on earlier drafts; to Zelia Gallo and Oyvind Skörge for both comments and research
assistance; and to Lea Sitkin and Kate Steward for research assistance.
i An example would be Pierson and Skocpol (2007) in which the significant criminal justice initiatives of mid-20
th Century activist government receive no attention whatsoever.
ii Consistently with our argument about the effects of competition, Gordon and Huber’s (2007) study found no
electoral cycle effects in non-competitive judicial retention elections in 17 Kansas counties, as compared with clear effects in the 14 counties where judges were selected on the basis of partisan elections. To date, underlining the need for further research on the local determinants of crime policy, electoral cycle research has been more focused on federal (presidential) and state (gubernatorial, state supreme court) elections (see for example Hall 1992; Smith 2004; Yates and Fording 2005) than on local elections. iii We focus our analysis on non-southern cities, and acknowledge that the explanation may be different for the
South.
iv The implications for Philadelphia, not least in terms of the polarising effects of intensive policing, are
represented in Goffman’s vivid ethnography (2014). v A decision which was made during a period of significant black migration from the South.
vi Some key differences between migrants from overseas, and black American migrants from the South,
themselves related to the American political system, help to explain the dramatically different levels to which those groups became integrated in the city trenches system. The political regime in the Jim Crow South deliberately obstructed both the formation of political networks and the development of education by and for blacks. Even given that, as with most migration, those migrating North were among the best educated and organised of their group, it is logical to suppose that the blacks who moved north in search of a better life and an escape from Jim Crow would have been, on average, considerably less educated and politically organised
47
than other migrant groups, implying that their full integration would have been more costly for the localities to which they moved. The fragmented American system has never managed to co-ordinate an effective strategy to tackle the continuing effects of Jim Crow – a fact which is reflected in the racial patterns of crime, imprisonment, educational disadvantage and residential segregation discussed in this paper.